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Greco-Roman antiquity is often presumed to provide the very paradigm of humanism from the Renaissance to the present. This paradigm has been increasingly challenged by new theoretical currents such as posthumanism and the "new materialisms", which point toward entities, forces, and systems that pass through and beyond the human and dislodge it from its primacy as the measure of things.
Antiquities beyond Humanismseeks to explode the presumed dichotomy between the ancient tradition and the twenty-first century "turn" by exploring the myriad ways in which Greek and Roman philosophy and literature can be understood as foregrounding the non-human. Greek philosophy in particular is filled with metaphysical explanations of the cosmos grounded in observations of the natural world, while other areas of ancient humanistic inquiry - poetry, political theory, medicine - extend
into the realms of plant, animal, and even stone life, continually throwing into question the ontological status of living and non-living beings. By casting the ancient non-human or more-than-human in a new light in relation to contemporary questions of gender, ecological networks and non-human communities,
voice, eros, and the ethics and the politics of posthumanism, the volume demonstrates that encounters with ancient texts, experienced as both familiar and strange, can help forge new understandings of life, whether understood as physical, psychical, divine, or cosmic.
About the author
Emanuela Bianchi is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature with affiliations in Classics and Gender and Sexuality Studies at New York University. She works at the intersection of ancient Greek philosophy and literature, French and German nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, and feminist and queer theory. She is the author of The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (Fordham University Press, 2014), and has published
numerous articles in journals including Hypatia, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Philosophy Today, Epochê, and Angelaki. She is currently at work on a manuscript provisionally entitled Emergence and Concealment: Nature, Hegemony, Kinship.
Sara Brill is Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University, where she has also served as Chair of the Classical Studies Program. She works on the psychology, politics, and zoology of Plato and Aristotle, as well as contemporary feminist and political theory. She is the author of Plato on the Limits of Human Life (Indiana University Press, 2013) and has published numerous articles on Plato, Aristotle, Greek tragedy, and the Hippocratic corpus. She is currently at work on a manuscript
entitled Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life, forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
Brooke Holmes is Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics at Princeton University. Her research centres on ancient medicine and life science, Greek literature (especially Homer and tragedy), ancient philosophy, reception studies, literary theory, and continental philosophy. She is the author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (Princeton University Press, 2010) and Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy
(I. B. Tauris and OUP, 2012) and has co-edited four books, including the experimental publication Liquid Antiquity (DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, 2017), which was accompanied by an exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens. She is currently at work on a book entitled The Tissue of the World: Sympathy and
the Concept of Nature in Greco-Roman Antiquity and directs the research network Postclassicisms.
Summary
The presumed dichotomy between a Greco-Roman paradigm of Western humanism and new theoretical currents in the humanities is exploded in this volume, which explores the myriad ways in which Greek and Roman philosophy and literature can be understood as foregrounding the non-human rather than simply reflecting the ideals of classical humanism.
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Among the volume's many virtues, I am struck in particular by the boldness among all authors in staking out interpretively ambitious stances that offer great potential reward ... the book offers occasion to rethink human positioning in light of the horrific errors regarding self-conception in our own time by returning to the ancient view of the interconnected cosmos in which the human is merely a part, and one materially dependent on the whole.
Report
Among the volume's many virtues, I am struck in particular by the boldness among all authors in staking out interpretively ambitious stances that offer great potential reward ... the book offers occasion to rethink human positioning in light of the horrific errors regarding self-conception in our own time by returning to the ancient view of the interconnected cosmos in which the human is merely a part, and one materially dependent on the whole. Colin C. Smith, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
